WASHINGTON D.C, Oct 8: Bangladesh expressed dissatisfaction Friday over its very little access to global climate finance despite being one of the worst victims of the climate change.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith expressed the dismay at a meeting with World Bank Vice President for South Asia Region Annette Dixon on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) here.
He raised the concern when the heads of the WB and IMF have urged the world's finance leaders to take urgent steps towards inclusive growth for ending extreme poverty.
Experts say Bangladesh needs to invest more in efforts to offset the climate change impacts for sustaining the country's recent trends in economic growth and poverty reduction.
Mr Muhith told the WB vice president that Bangladesh receives very little amount of money from the global polluters despite being one of the worst victims of climate change.
"We have done a lot with our own fund to adapt to the climate change impacts. But our access to the climate fund is very little," he said.
A recent World Bank report praised Bangladesh for its success in reducing extreme poverty, and at the same time, pointed out the challenges to further reduce it to below 3 per cent by 2030 and achieve the Sustainable Development Goal-1 (SDG).
The WB estimated that the country's GDP growth should rise up to 8.8 per cent until 2030 if the country has to achieve the SDG-1.
Amid limited concessional resources, the finance minister stressed the need for getting ready to adapt to costly funds for supporting the development efforts of the country.
"Though we are benefited from concessional loans, we should be ready for scale-up fund," he told newsmen on the sidelines of the WB-IMF events.
He said Bangladesh has started taking both soft and hard-term loans to get adapted to costly funds as the country is about to graduate from a least developed country to lower middle income country.
"It will help us get more and more loans for development projects. Our present loan burden is only $24 billion. Our economy has the strength to shoulder twice of that amount," he said.
At the meeting with the WB vice president, he also expressed concern over the project quality of the WB that has recently deteriorated and stressed on repeated modifications.
He pointed out that the WB officials visit Bangladesh and stay there for few days to hold discussions on the projects. They should stay for a longer period to help Bangladeshi officials prepare flawless project documents, he added.
syful-islam@outlook.com